MCSHANN, JAY (b. 1916)

Jay McShann at the piano

Emerging in the 1930s from the blues-drenched
soil of eastern Oklahoma, Jay McShann quickly
established himself as a dominant Kansas City
pianist, rivaled only by Mary Lou Williams
and Count Basie. His "band that swung the
blues" formed in 1939 and included some of
the finest musicians of the area. It was this
band's recordings, in 1941, that gave Charlie
Parker his first national exposure. McShann
continues to be active at the beginning of the
new millennium, his diverse styles constituting
a lexicon of twentieth-century jazz and
blues pianism.

Jay McShann was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma,
on January 12, 1916. Muskogee, a town
of 30,000, was also the home of guitarist Barney
Kessel, bassist Aaron Bell, and tenor saxophonist
Don Byas, all important jazz men. It
was with Byas that McShann began his professional
career in 1931; by 1937 he was fronting
his own bands in the Kansas City area.
By then, McShann had become a versatile pianist,
combining his blues background of barrelhouse
and boogie-woogie (influenced by
Pete Johnson) with a percussive, jazz comping
style characterized by dense, chordal textures.
Though most associate McShann with small
groups, particularly those with bassist Gene
Ramey and drummer Gus Johnson, his most
famous band, formed in 1939, was a large ensemble
that boasted such outstanding sidemen
as trumpeters Orville "Piggy" Minor and
Buddy Anderson, trombonist Bob Mabane,
and saxophonist Charlie Parker, as well as
blues shouter Walter Brown. Later recordings
for Decca in Wichita, Kansas, and Dallas,
Texas, yielded such classic numbers as "Swingmatism,"
"Confessin' the Blues," and "Hootie
Blues," several of which contained the protobop
solos of nineteen-year-old Charlie "Yardbird"
Parker.

Bolstered by the success of the Decca recordings,
especially "Confessin'," which sold
over 5 million copies, McShann moved to New
York in 1942 to open at the Savoy opposite
Lucky Millinder's orchestra. McShann's powerful
blues-style-based jazz was still relatively
unknown outside the Midwest, but the band
garnered rave reviews from the critics. McShann
returned to the recording studio in
1942, adding "Sepian Stomp" and "Jumpin'
the Blues" to jazz posterity. After this session,
the band began to break up, and McShann
was drafted in 1944.

Returning to music after the war, McShann
preferred playing with small groups, working
as leader and accompanist with such artists
as blues shouters Big Joe Turner and Jimmy
Witherspoon and swing violinist Claude "Fiddler"
Williams. In 1959 McShann returned to
Kansas City, which is still his home. Much of
his playing, including at many major European
jazz festivals, was with Williams and
drummer Paul Gunther. McShann also began
to develop his singing, fashioning a raspy
blues timbre reminiscent of Turner and Walter
Brown. In 1978 he was featured with the
Lincoln (Nebraska) Symphony Orchestra in
Robert Beadell's work Variations for Jazz Trio, Flugelhorn and Strings. Also that year, accompanied
by Paul Gunther and Randy Snyder on
bass, McShann was profiled in Hootie's Blues,
a film by Bart Becker and Michael Farrell. McShann
is also a major participant in the documentary
The Last of the Blue Devils (1979). In
honor of his contribution to music in Kansas
City, by proclamation of the governor, March
3, 1979, was designated "Jay McShann Day."